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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22679401">Hard feelings and softer thoughts</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/starboygoku/pseuds/starboygoku'>starboygoku</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Dragon Ball</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Anthology, Eventual Romance, F/M, Falling In Love, Romance, Soulmates, YEAH I SAID IT</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-02-12</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-08-10</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 23:36:28</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>2</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>2,947</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22679401</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/starboygoku/pseuds/starboygoku</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p><i>"You seem so familiar."</i><br/> <br/> <i>"Do I?"</i></p><p>  <i>"As familiar as if I knew you my entire life."</i></p><p>  <i>"Don't be ridiculous. You don't know me like that."</i></p><p> <i>"But it feels like I do—like I did. In this life, or in the last."</i></p><p> <i>"The last? I don't think so."</i></p><p> <i>"...Well, maybe not my last. But you never know. I'm just certain I knew you long before we met."</i><br/><br/><b>A collection of short stories, most of which stand alone, regarding Uub, Bura, and a certain inevitability. </b><br/></p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Bra Briefs/Uub, Buub, Uub/Bra, Uub/Bura</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>8</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>11</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. He did not know where he was</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“Uub?”</p><p>He tensed at Bura’s tone; gentleness, affection, and the tiniest hint of a tease were the overtures of unmistakable whimsy which, in this woman, meant an assertion of will as law. She shifted and her chin prodded his chest sharply as she wiggled her body against his. </p><p>“Honey?”</p><p>Her second call made him open his sleepy eyes. “What, Bura?”</p><p>“Do you love me?”</p><p>It was a foolish question that gripped the furthest parts of Uub’s brain in blind fear of whatever capricious request would follow. Bura was always like this, always waiting until the very moment he was at his most vulnerable to test the depth of the thorn in his side. What had he not already promised her in this bed? </p><p>“Of course I love you,” he said.</p><p>“But suppose something happened,” she said playfully. “Suppose you had to choose in a fight. Would you die or would you come back to me?”</p><p>Uub sat up and turned to face her in the dark while confusion spread across his face. “What are you talking about?”</p><p>“Well,” she said, propping up on her elbows so that the sheets fell down the suggested shape of her hiding in the faint moonlight, “if it came down to it… if something happened again that my dad and Goku couldn’t handle…”</p><p><em> If something like </em> <b> <em>you</em> </b> <em> happened again. </em>She didn’t need to say it.</p><p>“...Would you die or would you come back to me?”</p><p>He felt his jaw go slack. “Why would you say something like that?”</p><p>“It’s only a question,” she said easily. “So just give me an answer.”</p><p>It wasn’t only a question and Uub didn’t want to give her an answer. He wanted to lay back down, pull Bura into his arms and over his chest, and fall quickly back into the liminal place between consciousness and sleep from which her query pulled him. </p><p>“How am I supposed to answer that?” he asked helplessly, rubbing his tired eyes and trying hard to see her expression in the dark. </p><p>Bura didn’t respond and he still couldn’t see her, but he could imagine the transparency of her eyes—seeing him and seeing beyond him at once—scolding, judging, and waiting while he fumbled with his words. Her silence confirmed his fears; the answer she was looking for wasn’t something he could give.</p><p>“That’s not going to happen anyway,” he tried at last.</p><p>“But <em> suppose </em> it did.”</p><p>She drove as hard a bargain as ever.</p><p>“Then what are the supposed circumstances? What are the stakes?” he countered. A small derisive noise escaped her perfect lips, but Uub held his ground. “Am I dying because I’m foolish, or am I dying to save everyone else?”</p><p>“Does it matter?”</p><p>
  <em> Does it matter if you’re still dead? </em>
</p><p>“It does to me.”</p><p>It was the wrong answer because it wasn’t what Bura wanted to hear. As soon as he spoke he sensed her anger bubble beneath her skin, irradiating her ki with the tangy sharpness of rage. Uub felt his stomach go hollow. Every time she rose up against him he felt this, the same coiled terror deep in his gut like a warning over and over again demanding he choose between fight or flight. Defeated, he lay back down beside her.</p><p>“Can’t we talk about this in the morning?” he croaked tiredly.</p><p>“No,” Bura replied firmly. She sounded far away, and Uub slowly closed his eyes.</p><p>“What do you want me to say?”</p><p>She descended at once, twisting back into his arms and spilling her request in a murmur from lips pressed to the shell of his ear. <em> You have to come back to me,</em> she whispered as gentle as the dawn. <em> Come back no matter what. </em></p><p>He wanted to say he would. If he could promise her he would do this one thing, this one little something, then they could remain right where they were, as they were, forever. Uub wanted that, but found he couldn’t say it. He tried and the words caught in his throat like grief. When he stepped onto kinto’un all those years ago, he had already promised something else; a lifetime of obligation in exchange for a place in the world. He couldn’t be greedy now, and what she really wanted from him was selfishness.</p><p>“You know I’ll try,” Uub whispered to the dark, holding Bura tightly and praying she wouldn’t slip away like smoke. He knew it would never be enough.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Les Oiseaux</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  <em> “Then why, if you understand, are you so un-unhappy?” she wailed. “Why do you mind so fearfully? Why do you look so aw-awful?” </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em> Reggie gulped, and again he waved something away. “I can’t help it,” he said, “I’ve had a blow. If I cut off now, I’ll be able to—” </em>
</p>
<p>
  <em> “How can you talk of cutting off now?” said Anne scornfully. She stamped her foot at Reggie; she was crimson. “How can you be so cruel? I can’t let you go until I know for certain that you are just as happy as you were before you asked me to marry you. Surely you must see that, it’s so simple.” </em>
</p>
<p>— Katherine Mansfield, <em> Mr and Mrs Dove </em></p>
<p> </p>
<p>“How many times do you need to hear no?”</p>
<p>There was no malice in Uub’s question when he sat down beside her, the beer bottle in his hand deceptively small in his grasp, but Bura replied with venom. </p>
<p>“How many times do you?”</p>
<p>His cool, dark eyes flickered over her. “Once was enough,” he said. </p>
<p>His words were sharp, too, and she first deflated where she sat then leaned over the little table on her elbows, chin in her palm. He wasn’t being mean and she had certainly never been kind to him, but it was true. She only had to turn him down once and he never asked after her again… It was enough to make her wonder if he meant it the first time, or if he even meant it now. </p>
<p>“Sorry,” Bura said vaguely. </p>
<p>Uub drank. “For what?” </p>
<p>“I’ll take it back, you know,” she said, crossing her arms. If he wanted to play with her he was going to be disappointed; she never lost. He knew. But Uub only smiled at her like she had never been cruel to him, like she told him a joke instead of issuing a threat, then looked back out at the open floor of the reception hall where the bride and groom were going to dance. Bura looked too, just to see, to confirm that the marriage she watched transpire earlier in the night was really true.</p>
<p>It was. Son Goten was holding a beautiful girl in his arms that Bura barely knew but hated, and the sight of them spinning happily was the final ‘no’ in a string of denials she brought upon herself. There was never anything between them but one-sided love; she was the wrong type of girl for him, entirely too young and too crass, and there was no hope of him loving her back long before now. Her head knew it but her heart was more willful in its ignorance; logic failed her often in the face of great emotion. Delicious sadness, nuclear rage, the full-bodied swell of shame. She felt them all and then looked away.</p>
<p>Her gaze fell on Uub beside her. There was nothing special about him; he had a plain, even face that would have been symmetrical if no one had ever broken his nose and shattered his eye socket, but someone had. Usually old wounds made a man look rugged but Uub’s only made him look sleepy. These, along with the natural darkness of his eyelids and the sloping planes of his face that never quite formed a sharp angle—although again, perhaps, if his nose had not been broken—made him unremarkable.</p>
<p>“Who broke your nose?”</p>
<p>He glanced at her skeptically and Bura held steady beneath his scrutiny, unwilling to concede for even a moment that she posed her question impulsively.</p>
<p>“Who do you think?”</p>
<p>“Son Goku,” she answered dully.</p>
<p>“Bingo.”</p>
<p>Naturally. She began to pick at the table’s centerpiece.</p>
<p>“How did you know it’s been broken?”</p>
<p>It was Bura’s turn to look at him suspiciously. “How could I not?”</p>
<p>He pinched the bridge of his nose like he could somehow make it straight again and shrugged, unconcerned. It was fascinating to watch how casually her meanness rolled off him, like oil beading on water. He did not care. The revelation came to Bura as jealousy and she looked him over one more time, her eyes darting in calculated appraisal. Like most of the men in the room Uub had a strong body which moved gracefully and belied its violent purpose, but his limbs folded up on themselves so that he seemed small despite his obvious height and the tightly coiled muscles beneath his skin. Bura wondered absently who paid for the suit he was wearing—she knew he was poor and it fit him well, as if it were bespoke. </p>
<p>He did not notice her eyes on him; his gentle attention was purposely elsewhere and she was forgotten. Uub drank his beer, Goten danced with his bride, and Bura burned alive where she sat, humiliated. Later she would insist she didn’t mean to throw back her chair the way she did when she stood, but the truth was that she flung it away and reveled in its clatter upon the terrazzo floors and in the sharpness with which Uub’s attention rocketed back to her. Anyone else who looked did not matter.</p>
<p>“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I hate this.”</p>
<p>“Okay,” Uub agreed quickly. “Just don’t throw anything else.”</p>
<p>They stepped out of the reception hall together with a great burst of reality, out from the convivial music and dim golden lights, and into stark, industrial silence. The corridors of the hotel where Goten held his wedding were plain, nondescript halls with fluorescent lights and heavy green paneled walls lining burgundy carpeted floors. There were at least two other reception halls; they came from Ballroom B and the placard across the hall marked Ballroom C, but Ballrooms C and A were both empty. It struck Bura as the door shut behind them with a soft click that perhaps all the world was empty except for Ballroom B, and for a moment she thought she might cry. She didn’t have a plan and she didn’t want to be with Uub; she only wanted to leave and to not be alone. He was just there.</p>
<p>“Let’s go see the garden,” Uub suggested, his attention once more settled somewhere away from her. He pointed to the south end of the hall where it opened up to a courtyard only to frown as quickly as he noticed it. “Never mind, it’s closed.”</p>
<p>Technically, the courtyard was not a part of the wedding reservation; there was a little sign put up near the door that directed guests of the Son family back to Ballroom B, but they could safely ignore it. She was Bura Brief, after all. She only had to move the sign a little to the left and then it wouldn’t mean anything at all to her. Uub watched her plainly while taking off his tie.</p>
<p>“You really don’t understand what no means, do you?” he said, more statement than question. </p>
<p>Bura pushed the door open. “Why would you say that?”</p>
<p>“Because I would have went back to Ballroom B,” he laughed, slipping his tie into his pocket and stepping out into the inky twilight after her. </p>
<p>Bura shot him a harsh look over her shoulder as they slipped deeper into the garden. “Really? You’d just turn back around?”</p>
<p>“Well, someone who makes a little less than 900 zeni an hour put that sign there,” he said. “They put up that sign and all the other stupid decorations Chichi wanted and then had to do it all over again when Valese started crying that they weren’t the ones she’d picked out because Chichi had changed the reservation. So someone had to do it again and I’d guess that made them feel pretty disrespected, so I probably would have obeyed their sign.”</p>
<p>“But you didn’t,” Bura pointed out quickly.</p>
<p>“I didn’t,” he agreed and even though there was nothing argumentative about his posture she felt herself at odds with him. </p>
<p>900 zeni… the cost of his respect was astronomically cheap, not that she wanted it. Bura didn’t care about his sense of fairness; it was his ease that earned her envy, how swiftly he moved from rejection to amiability without a single failure of nerve anywhere between. Her nerves were everywhere—they always were—but Uub made his steadiness as cardinal as true north. If she wanted she could have directed herself by it, but where? A shut off fountain and the overpowering scent of gardenia greeted them at the end of the path, the silence of the hall giving way to the twilight chorus of cicadas. He took her nowhere. </p>
<p>Bura sat on a stone bench far enough away from the overgrown flower beds that she wouldn’t sneeze and Uub sat beside her, which she supposed was the least awkward thing he could do. All the other benches were so far away that they would have either been yelling at each other or sitting in silence, and it would have been too strange for her to sit while he stood away to the side, hovering. It was best he took the spot beside her, even if it left a tense gap of mindful awareness between their bodies. Ballroom B was another world of small tables and crowds of people so it was perfectly anecdotal that they might appear side by side, but there were no accidents now. He followed and he waited, and she knew.</p>
<p>“So why didn’t you?” she baited him quietly.</p>
<p>“Hmm?” </p>
<p>“Why didn’t you just go back to the reception like the sign said?”</p>
<p>“Ah,” Uub said. “Well, it was my idea to come out here in the first place, so don’t forget that. But I hated it there, too.”</p>
<p>She was surprised and must have looked it; he hadn’t seemed ill at ease once that night or any other night she knew him. He smiled faintly, wickedly, and a ghost of boyish charm washed over him so that she understood for a moment how his face worked even if it wasn’t conventionally attractive. She blushed and the moment faded just like the specter of his handsomeness until he was only Uub again. He was just there, the same as he had always been.</p>
<p>“I didn’t know you hated parties,” she said evenly. Her composure was stronger than his subtleties, her will iron but her heart clay as it beat treacherously faster than it had the moment before. </p>
<p>“I don’t particularly,” he replied. “I just felt like leaving.”</p>
<p>“‘Just felt like leaving?’” she parroted back, laughing first then narrowing her eyes before letting something cruel part her lips just to taste it. She nudged her shoulder against his. “Admit it,” she said, “you left because I asked you.”</p>
<p>Uub made no reply. The garden hummed around them, a cacophony of assent, and his silence that should have felt like victory instead caused a lurch in her throat. He stared ahead and didn’t move; she saw the tautness of his jaw, of his whole body, and looked to see the passing of breath in his chest but none came. He was caught and so was she, trapped together and each holding the key to the door but refusing to open it. She had him but did not want him, and he looked so tired, like sleep had eluded him every moment from the first he loved her until now, but his eyes would not close.</p>
<p>“Please don’t make me,” he said at length. His voice came quietly but so smoothly that Bura could have believed him to be emotionless, but she knew better. “I’m not like you.”</p>
<p>“You aren’t,” she agreed. He wasn’t brave enough to stand up twice.</p>
<p>“Bura…” </p>
<p>Her name on his lips was a rarity; she watched it bloom, full in his jaw and pooling until he pouted, then gone as he was interrupted. The door they came from opened and light poured out to fill the night that had fallen around them. Someone who made 900 zeni an hour appeared in silhouette; it was a woman, and she informed them duly that the garden was closed. </p>
<p>“We’ll be right in,” Bura assured her. She turned to Uub. “Won’t we?”</p>
<p>“Yes,” he said, blinking slowly at the figure which was now turning away and shutting the door. </p>
<p>He shook his head and quickly stood, forgetting to make himself small when he did. Bura stared at his height. Knowing it could be the last time they would ever be alone, she wanted to remember him like this; uncoiled and off guard so that the things he hid were all the more transparent, more obvious, more fascinating. He really did have something to envy even if he had nothing to love. Bura didn’t know how to be more open with anybody; she didn’t know how to be gentle. She wasn’t even sure she knew how to be kind.</p>
<p>“Uub?”</p>
<p>He looked down at her, expression so neutral she had no idea what he might think. She wanted to apologize, legitimately this time, but couldn’t make herself do it. She couldn’t say it, didn’t think he would hear it, and knew the space between them would never survive it.</p>
<p>“I… I didn’t want to be alone,” she told him.</p>
<p>“I know,” he said softly. “Let’s go back inside.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
          <p>Thanks to <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/users/Breezytealy/pseuds/Breezytealy">Breezytealy</a> the beta and vibe check.</p>
        </blockquote></div></div>
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